Protest The Hero on the future of the fan-funded album

They have sold an estimated 300,000 copies of their first three studio releases,
worldwide. They have several top-ten album chart positions in their native home of
Canada. They had previous support from established record labels.
But despite this, progressive metal band Protest The Hero asked their fans to fund their new album, Volition, on Indiegogo.

Why?

"As successful as we've been fortunate to be, we found ourselves
in an almost identical situation every time we finished touring:
penniless," the group's frontman Rody Walker told Wired.co.uk
during their current tour. "We would do these records, go out and
tour them, take a massive advance from a label but at the end of
the day there's no way to pay that back. You don't make any money
off CD sales and you barely have enough money to survive.

"I'm almost thirty and I just moved back in with my parents.
It's not a glamorous lifestyle."

The group broke down how much it would cost to produce the
album, so fans could see exactly where their pledges were going.
The band only gave themselves just over $800 (£500) per month, per
band member, as a salary. Other costs went towards anything from
studio recording time ($22,500), mixing and mastering ($10,500)
right down to pre-production for each song ($200 per track) and
hard drives ($700).

"We were all nervous," says Walker. "We sat down and discussed
it and thought that at the end of the day it was the only route to
go. We know what it's like to not have any money to continue so any
change had to be positive, even if it wasn't successful. We had to
take the shot.

"Our drummer at the time [Moe Carlson], who was a big video game
enthusiast, saw all the Kickstarters for video games that were making serious money and
we thought it would be an awesome way to avoid taking an advance
[from a label]."

It was a successful campaign: the band raised the entire
$125,000 (£77,000) they asked for within 24 hours. The final count
over the month of the pledge was almost $350,000 (£216,000). "The
campaign was so successful we had to sign some labels on for
distribution, and it worked out well for us -- the ball was finally
in our court. Instead of feeling like we're working for the label
it's more like the label is working for us," says Walker.

But is it a sustainable business model? Is putting the power in
the hands of the fans a route to success that can be repeatedly
trodden?

"I honestly don't think that crowdsourcing is a sustainable
business model if everyone's doing it," says Walker, noting that
they could consider crowdfunding again "if the climate was
right".

"It will get far too convoluted, and everyone [the fans] will be
spread too thin," he says. "But I do think that it's a blip on the
radar that the music industry needed. I think with crowdfunding
it's a way you can finally take it back and give the labels the
kick they need to realise things need to change, and it needs to be
mutually beneficial. It can't be a one-way street.

"I've seen campaigns where bands try to buy vans, [or] to get
marketing money, but I don't believe in that. You're not producing
or creating anything. [For us] it was important to mix commerce and
art. I don't think campaigns have much potential for success if
you're not creating something... There really needs to be a product
that's being produced with the campaign."

The story for Protest The Hero has ended well, but it was the
result of years of building up a fan base. Most new bands, even
those with the luck of a social media success injection on their
side, will not be able to raise a hundred grand in a day. But the
larger an established band is, and the more it feels squeezed for
cash from a label, the more attention it will likely see from that
label when the group exploits the direct connections it now has
with its fans to go it alone.

That could ultimately help readdress the imbalance between
artists and labels that Walker feels his group has been the victim
of.

In a recent Reddit AMA session, Protest The Hero guitarist Tim Millar laid
out some interesting figures: "There is a 'mechanical royalty'
which works out to $0.93 [in earnings for a band, per album sale],"
he said. "Outside of this, we've never seen a royalty cheque.
Technically, we're still in debt to the labels."

"Globally with our three full-length albums, we've roughly sold
300,000 units," Millar continued. "300,000 [earning us] $0.93
equals $279,000 to our business over seven years. If these albums
were sold at $10 a pop, that's generating $3,000,000 dollars.

"Where did the other $2,721,000 go?"

Protest The Hero's new album Volition is out now,
and the band will be touring in the UK with progressive metallers
Tesseract in early-2014.